Classic Bug Reports

A bug report is sometimes entertaining either because of the personalities involved or because of the bug itself. Here are a collection of links into public bug trackers; I learned about most of these in a recent Twitter thread.

14 thoughts on “Classic Bug Reports”

When Mozilla’s Bugzilla picked up the ability to have shared bug searches, I started a list of Fun bugs that has some entertaining entries. Most not in the sense of reports of “interesting” things, mostly just joke bugs of various sorts. Might be entertaining nonetheless. 🙂

While not a public bug tracker, it is publically documented with a lengthy explanation and apology from the developer in question. The commercial game ‘Eve online’ rendered my (and others) windows installation unbootable by accidentally deleteing the boot loader’s configuration file C:\boot.ini instead of their own installer’s boot.ini.

There was a famous GHC (Haskell compiler) bug, where the compiler would delete the user’s source program file if it found a type error. I don’t know a tracker url for it, but it has become legendary. Talk about a language that doesn’t coddle the weak :).

Oh, oops — I have the search shared only with users with “editbugs”, I think because I didn’t want it shared with people who hadn’t shown a modicum of responsibility in terms of not piling on bugs with useless comments. 🙂 (Not that comments on most of these bugs would be particularly useful, either — just that when it comes to commenting on joke bugs, a sort of judiciousness is desirable.)

Here’s an exported form of the buglist as it currently exists — won’t be updated as new fun bugs come in, but it’s good for a snapshot-in-time at least.

One of my favourite bug reports can be found in the book “Debugging” by Dave Agans, where a video encoder would suddenly slow down whenever the person who was trying to debug it had a certain shirt on. I don’t have the book in my office so I can’t provide any more details than that though.